I didn’t plan this post, but thought it would be interesting to bring up. After posting my most recent Spark Post (not very long ago), WordPress showed me a confirmation (“You have published this many posts” or something) and under it was this quote, which I have screen shot for all to see.

The documentary “Miss Representation” discussed how women were subject to advertising after World War II that encouraged them to leave their factory jobs in order to put men back in the work force and women back in the homes. While I realize we’re not in a time of a major labor shift like the one after the war, Christie’s quote is very interesting and hauntingly similar to the advertising women were targeted by. Obviously Christie didn’t rally for women to stay in the home or anything (though she was known for her stereotyping!), but doesn’t it almost sound like that? “If you want to be a good writer and have great ideas, you better keep your home nice and clean!” It’s interesting that WordPress would use this quote where it sounds as if she’s encouraging all us writers to “get back in the kitchen.” While I’m sure this isn’t what WordPress intended, I’m surprised they couldn’t find another Christie quote to replace this one with, because honestly, while maybe this was helpful for Christie, I don’t see much inspiration from this quote.

2 Responses to Really WordPress?

The ones I received after that one were Joseph Heller saying “Every writer I know has trouble writing” and Gustave Flaubert saying “The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.” Much more appropriate.

Reading this, I have absolutely no idea why WordPress would feel the need to include a quote that does nothing to me except remind me that for much of the twentieth century, women were for the most part valued based on their fecundity and their domestic abilities within the household. To be honest, even if this quip had been said by a man, it would feel severely out of place on a site such as this one. This leads me to wonder what it is the managers of this website gleaned from the brief quote that convinced them to reproduce it publicly on their site. The fact that it was uttered by Agatha Christie, a celebrated female author of murder mystery texts that include relatively dynamic female characters, is slightly surprising perhaps because I have had limited exposure to her and her work. I get little inspiration to do anything other than cooking or eating in the kitchen, two functions which the kitchen is designed to contain and support.

I find it interesting that Christie, as a successful woman writer, is selling the benefits of spending more time in the kitchen –in part to women who are inspired by her acclaim– to plan one’s writing, presumably to sell it and become successful like her. This seems to imply that only after becoming better acquainted with the wonders of one’s kitchen, where women were historically expected to spend much of their time preparing meals for and cleaning after the men and children in the household, can one become successful in one’s own right. The inclusion of this quote on the WordPress website, likely managed by men if I learned anything from “Miss Representation,” strikes me as distasteful at best and I would respectfully ask that the website’s editors consider removing it from the site’s content.